Alexis Claude Clairaut

Thursday, 30 January 2025

Alexis Clairaut

Alexis Claude Clairaut (13 May 1713 – 17 May 1765) was a prominent French mathematician, astronomer, geophysicist, and intellectual.

Biography

Childhood

Clairaut was born in Paris, France, where his father taught mathematics. He was a prodigy — at the age of twelve he wrote a memoir on four geometrical curves and under his father's tutelage he made such rapid progress in the subject that in his thirteenth year he read before the Académie française an account of the properties of four curves which he had discovered. When only sixteen he finished a treatise on tortuous curves, Recherches sur les courbes a double courbure, which, on its publication in 1731, procured his admission into the French Academy of Sciences, although he was below the legal age as he was only eighteen.

The shape of the Earth

In 1736, together with Pierre Louis Maupertuis, he took part in the expedition to Lapland, which was undertaken for the purpose of estimating a degree of the meridian arc. After his return he published his treatise Théorie de la figure de la terre (1743). In this work he promulgated the theorem, known as Clairaut's theorem, which connects the gravity at points on the surface of a rotating ellipsoid with the compression and the centrifugal force at the equator. This hydrostatic model of the shape of the Earth was founded on a paper by Colin Maclaurin, which had shown that a mass of homogeneous fluid set in rotation about a line through its centre of mass would, under the mutual attraction of its particles, take the form of an ellipsoid. Under the assumption that the Earth was composed of concentric ellipsoidal shells of uniform density, Clairaut's theorem could be applied to it, and allowed the ellipticity of the Earth to be calculated from surface measurements of gravity. In 1849 Stokes showed that Clairaut's result was true whatever the interior constitution or density of the Earth, provided the surface was a spheroid of equilibrium of small ellipticity.

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Alexis_Clairaut

Biography

Childhood

The shape of the Earth

Football career

Biography

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